Can Good Teaching Be Measured?

In recent posts I have been arguing that if only we interpret the word “good” to mean “effective” we can ground our discussions of values (moral and otherwise) in facts about effectivness. I argue that in that context we can have greater and lesser degrees of goodness, measurable in terms of greater or lesser degrees of effectiveness. I also argue that some things can be done effectively and be good in terms of themselves but be considered overall “bad” if their effectiveness at what they are destroys (rather than aids) the flourishing of a greater possible effectiveness of a more complex and good-producing function.

In reply to my latest post on my thesis that “goodness equals effectiveness”, usagichan asks a couple of important questions, only one the first of which I have room here to address. I hope to address the other questions in turn:

Reading this and the “Goodness is a factual matter” post, the problem that I am having is that I don’t see how effectiveness, as used in your posts, is a measurable quality – in other words it seems to me that it is simply substituting one immeasurable quality for another. For example, imagine I were to examine how ‘good’ a teacher is – I substitute ‘effective’ for good – how do I determine how effective they are? Well, I could look at their students examination results, which are measurable, but only indicate how effective they are at preparing students for examinations. In this way a teacher that initiated a lifelong love of the subject, but performed poorly at drilling their students for the mechanics of examination would be measured as less ‘good’ than a duller but more efficient teacher, whose words were forgotten the moment their students left the exam hall.

Do you propose some sort of metric for ‘effectiveness’? Is it even possible to have an objective measure that encompasses all aspects of human life? Otherwise we come back to the point that you are mixing a concrete action (maximisation) with an abstract subject ‘effectiveness’.

The other thing that strikes me is that the concept of ‘effectiveness’ assumes that there is an ideal state which actions can either lead towards (i.e. are more effective) or away from (i.e. are less effective (anti-effective? deleterious?). Do you see this as a Universal ideal state, or is it dependent on your perspective/ culture/ potential?

In my response, I will focus on the teacher example for this post to address part (though not all) of the concern about metrics. I hope to address the other questions and challenges usagican raises in another post (or more).

First, let me specify that there can be factual matters which are measurable but not with scientific precision. I consider it an obvious fact that my parents’ love has contributed to my psychological well being. But there is neither a metric for determining precisely how much love they gave me nor precisely how much it benefited me. But it is still a true, factual matter that I have benefited from their love. Even if I am wrong and I have not, it is still a factual issue.

We are capable of separating good from bad judgments about many such factaul matters, even though they admit of no hard, decisive metrics or statistics for proving their truth in a quantitative way that finally settles them against all conceivable skeptics. Some questions of effectiveness can be quantified to either a lesser or greater extent. Others require philosophical clarity about concepts and good habits of non-scientific (but still empirically sensitive and scientifically informed) inference.

So, how would we go about objectively determining what a good teacher is?

Since I am arguing that everything, including teaching, is good insofar as it is effective (i.e. powerful) the measure for the best teaching would be that its overall effectiveness (power). There are two primary scales to judge effectiveness.

(1) Teaching is the function of imparting skills, information, and/or values to students. Whenever one being conveys information, skills, or priorities to another, teaching is happening and the conveyer is functionally the teacher and the information-receiver or skill-developer or values-developer is the student. This does not have to be a formal educational relationship necessarily. In fact, oftentimes teaching and learning may happen not only informally but unintentionally. Teaching happens even among non-human animals and some inanimate objects (for example, I can teach my computer and it can teach me). Teaching is effective to the degree that a student (i.e., anyone who learns) increases in knowledge or skill or attitude as the result of words or actions of a teacher (i.e., anyone who guides another in knoweldge, abilities, or values).

(2) The effectiveness of a teacher ideally goes well beyond the specifical instances of increasing knowledge, ability, or specific attitude in a student. All further instances of the student successfully incorporating the learned knowledge, abilities or attitudes are the lingering effectiveness of the teacher in the student. Further, to the extent that the student positively or negatively affects other things in the world by using what she has learned from her teacher to either increase or decrease other things’effectiveness, her teacher is also effective, through the agency of the student, in those other good things’ increases or decreases of effectiveness. The teacher’s power as an effective teacher is maximized to the extent that greater net sums of total positive effectiveness results both in her students and through her students (and then even through the further effects of those good things her students have positively impacted).

This means that the best teaching is the kind that has the greatest positive influence on the students’ entire lives. The best teaching is the kind that most increases the powers of the student such that every time the student exercises their powers in the way that was taught to them, the teacher is once again powerful both in the life of the student and through the life of the student.

So, while an effective act of conveying information is good and effective at the moment at which learning happens, clearly if the information is immediately forgotten and if the student develops no long term, effective skills (even unnoticed, unconscious, unmeasurable ones) then this is a lesser instance of teaching than an act of teaching that functions powerfully through the rest of a student’s life. So, if we measure learning by short term tests that do not measure long term increases in knowledge and skills then we are not adequately assessing the relative success of teaching.

In one case, a teacher whose greatest strength is being a charismatic and enthusiastic role model might infect a student with a greater zeal but less specific technical knowledge or discipline for a subject than would be ideal. Another, less magnetic but more technically rigorous, teacher might instill discipline and cultivate the virtues of carefulness and proficiency in a student. Another teacher may neither inspire much love nor discipline in students, but pack their heads with a knowledge. Which of these three teachers will overall impact their students for the best will vary student by student. Some students only need the inspiration and can rely on discipline they have learned elsewhere to carry them the rest of the way. Some students have plenty of excitement but need discipline or a better grounding in facts, etc.

But it seems clear to me that a teacher who could inspire zeal, train in discipline, and help with mastery of facts would be a superior teacher to those who could do only one of the three. And speaking roughly we might say that a teacher who was good with two out of the three was probably roughly as valuable to students as another teacher who could do a different two out of the three and the both of them are clearly more valuable than the teacher who can do only one out of the three (or none!).

And a beloved teacher who wildly entertains and befriends a class but does not really cultivate an effective love of the subject or an effective discipline in it or a solid grasp of its particular details would be, actually a bad teacher, even as he is a fine entertainer or friend.

Yet, an enthusiastic, discipline-and-detail-oriented teacher may enhance total teaching effectiveness by incorporating the non-teaching specific traits of friendliness and showmanship if these complement the teaching specific virtues such that they make them more effective.

I do not see hopeless ambiguity in thinking about how to rank priorities in teaching. Ideally each teacher would have all the necessary strengths and maximally as possible develop in her students all the necessary abilities, skill-sets, and knowledge-bases germane to the subject being taught, and would have students who use all this personal development to make the greatest positive impacts in the world that they themselves can.

Measuring is imprecise but there should be little question about what the ultimate ideals are. How to compare what is worse between two approaches to teaching which are deficient in different ways may require the devisement of ingenious metrics. Sometimes it may just vary with the nature of the subject being taught—whether it is one that is information heavy or skill heavy. A baseball coach who can impart plenty of information but does not know how to train students in skill activity is most likely going to be a worse teacher of hitters or pitchers (but maybe not of other coaches) than another coach with less feel for information and more of a knack for getting the mind and body to accept a technique. Differences in temperament may also be more or less relevant in different stages of student development. Younger students may require more training in basic behavioral discipline and more inspiration to love learning. Graduate students may need much more cultivation of necessary scholarly discipline but little inspiration to love to learn and little behavioral correction.

But I do not know why, despite all these situational judgments, we could not take it as granted, as a factual matter, that certain value priorities, skill-sets, and knowledge-sets are necessary for the intrinsic flourishing of some specific thing being taught (be it mathematics, cooking, or a martial art, etc.), and then devise empirical investigations which find out what kinds of methods and virtues of different teachers correlate especially highly with success in achieving those goods (those effective activities) in the students and which do not.

Educational research is already doing this, I am sure. In looking for what the traits and techniques that lead to greater learning are, they are not looking for something that they merely like or feel good about or prefer or desire but they are looking for what factually good, factually effective teaching factually consists in so that, as a matter of fact, there will result factually better mathematicians, chefs, martial artists, etc.

There are more interesting facets to usagican’s question (including more questions about metrics that I did not get to with this discussion of them) and there are more excellent comments I have gotten from others as well, so I hope to write more soon on these topics. In the meantime, Your Thoughts?

The considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts. Listed below are some of the most salient posts I have written on problems in value theory, metaethics, moral psychology, practical ethics, and normative moral theory. There are a lot of them but you do not need to read them all to understand any of them whose titles interest you in particular. So don’t avoid all of them for fear you cannot read all of them.